Ugandan station still closed, an ill omen for election

More than a year has passed since the government-influenced
Broadcasting Council summarily closed
the popular Central Broadcasting Service, or CBS. The council closed the
station in September 2009 as riots were erupting in
response to the government's decision to block the traditional Buganda king
from attending a youth celebration north of the capital, Kampala. Its continued closure bodes ill for independent news coverage of February's presidential election.

The influential CBS was owned by the Buganda kingdom and
represented the largest ethnic group, the Baganda, with broadcasts in English
and Luganda across the country. On September 10 and 11, 2009, the council shut
down CBS and three other stations, Ssubi FM,
Radio Two (locally known as Akaboozi), and the Catholic Church's Radio Sapientia, accusing them of
inciting violence. While the other three eventually resumed broadcasting, CBS
remains closed and most of its staff is unemployed.

"They just broke in and took the transmitter," former CBS news
editor Ndiwalana Kiwanuka told me. "We had only covered about two hours of the
riots before we were closed." Kiwanuka believes the riots were a pretext to
close the station.

The council shuttered the other stations in a similarly sudden
fashion. "We actually found out we were suspended via the radio," the managing
director of Radio Two, Maria Kiwanuka, told CPJ. "We had just done an interview
on Akaboozi (Radio Two) with the minister of information who announced our
closure. Akaboozi somehow announced its own closure." The council sent official
suspension notices to the stations days after they were switched off. A week
passed before Ssubi FM received a letter from the council announcing the closure
for "breaching minimum broadcasting standards," Ssubi FM journalist Robert
Sempala told CPJ. "We didn't understand the statement," Ssubi FM Program
Director Julius Kateega told CPJ. "We felt that we could not play music while
gunshots could be heard in town and decided to cover the Baganda riots."

Before suspending a license, the Broadcasting Council
typically obtains recordings from a station and negotiates with the station
manager, its chairman, Godfrey Mutabazi, told CPJ. But the riots, he said,
forced the council to take immediate action. "People were dying on the streets.
You can't call a council meeting and wait to take action under an emergency,"
he said. More than 20 people were killed during the riots, according to news reports.

The shuttered stations did eventually hand over recordings
taken during the riots, but managers said they were never told what content was
considered incitement to violence. "We were told the station had incited
violence. We had not; we had been very careful," Radio Two's Kiwanuka said, "We
had told the public to avoid the dangerous parts of town during the riots."
Human Rights Watch had multiple Luganda speakers listen to the CBS recordings
during the riots. Although the station called on the public to join the
protests and support the Baganda king, Human Rights
Watch reported, no references were made encouraging people to violence.
"They took all the recordings to find any incriminating evidence of our
broadcasts but they didn't find anything," said Kiwanuka of CBS.

CBS took the government to court late last year claiming the
station's closure was illegal. The government made a counter-claim, blaming CBS
for loss of life during the riots. In August, Uganda's High Court dismissed
the government suit, citing a lack of evidence, according to local reports.
The CBS claim is pending.

The Broadcast Council has broad powers to seize transmission
equipment without due process and can grant or withhold licenses using an
opaque set of conditions. Local journalists complain that the council acts as both
prosecutor and judge, taking its orders from on high. Although Mutabazi told
CPJ that the council has never received orders from the government, public
statements from officials tell another story. In March, presidential press
secretary Tamale Mirundi told reporters that CBS's closure was a "cabinet
decision" and that the station would not return to the air until it apologized
to the government, local
reports said.

Prior to the suspensions, all of the stations were popular
outlets that aired programs in Luganda, the most widely spoken local language,
journalists told me. Geoffrey Ssebaggala, now program coordinator for the Ugandan Human Rights Network for Journalists,
did an investigation into a secret detention center run by the Ugandan army as
a reporter for Radio Sapientia in 2008. After the station's management received
complaints from the Broadcast Council, Ssebaggala said, he was fired. The
Ugandan Human Rights Network reported that many journalists were fired under
state pressure in 2009, including three journalists each from Radio Sapentia,
Ssubi FM, and one from Radio Two.

The sackings and suspensions have taken
a toll on the stations' news coverage.Political programs on Ssubi FM were suspended and replaced with music,
Kateega said. "There is less emphasis on political issues now and more emphasis
on music. Our tag line is: Less Talk,
More Music," he said. Although it was not responding to a government
directive, Ssubi FM decided it was simply not worth risking further closure,
News Editor Evelyn Kabiite said.

Those fears are bound to dampen critical coverage of the February
2011 presidential election, CBS's Kiwanuka told me.

According to the Ugandan Journalists Union, members of the
ruling party own about 60 percent of the nation's radio stations. None of these
stations, local journalists told me, are expected to provide equal coverage to
opposition members.

And if they did think about covering the opposition, here's
an episode that would make them reconsider: Back in April, President Yoweri Museveni
instructed Felix Okot, owner of the Voice of Lango radio and a ruling party
parliamentarian, to publicly apologize for hosting an opposition candidate
Olara Otunnu on the station, the DailyMonitor reported. "And that incident
took place months before the election," Kiwanuka said. "Let's see what happens
in January."

(Reporting from Kampala)

Tom Rhodes is CPJ's East Africa representative, based in Nairobi. Rhodes is a founder of southern Sudan’s first independent newspaper. Follow him on Twitter: @africamedia_CPJ